The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media

jocanib@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 1416 points –
The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
bbc.co.uk

"As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point."

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Is Mastodon compatible with Lemmy?

Only somewhat. Lemmy Communities show up as users when viewed from mastodon, that boost every single post and comment in the community (so browsing it is near impossible, and there is no sorting). Mastodon users can interact with posts (but can't downvote), and they can post by @-ing the community.

You can't follow mastodon users or view mastodon posts from Lemmy. I heard kbin had some functionality to do with this tho

Gonna be honest, Fediverse is alpha as shit.

In terms of being unfinished, not chad-like.

This is gonna take a whiiiiiile to get real good, if reworking these things is even on the table.

It's sad that I thought you meant the chad version first. My brain is corrupted

Refuse to work properly with other applications but still allow some functionality in a slightly different interfacing out of good will for each other

Refuse to elaborate

Leave

I agree in a lot of ways. Lemmy does feel very beta at times. Mastodon does feel much more finished, except for the fact that favorites and boosts don't federate properly a lot of the time.

But this specifically feels perfectly fine to me. The fact that they're interoperable at all is more than I'd expect. Lemmy and Mastodon are so different in how they show content that I can't think of a much better way to do it (other than maybe having communities boost only posts and not comments when seen from mastodon).

How do you think they should be reworked to work better with each other?

I've seen people say this, but how? Are any lemmy clients compatible with mastodon in the sense that you can follow people or instances? I thought that was the big draw of kbin, that it combined both.

You can follow Lemmy communities on your Mastadon account. But I wouldn't recommend it. You get a string of out-of-context posts dominating your feed.

I mean I'd be more interested in it going the other way, and following a few mastodon accounts on my lemmy app. I'm not on mastodon and don't care to post there, but it'd be nice to be able to see some select things in my feed.

Try kbin, they are still separate feeds I think but you get both on the same website

From a mastodon users point of view a Lemmy user behaves like another Mastodon user. For instance this is what my Lemmy profile looks like from mastodon:

Lemmy communities also behave kinda like users:

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Even though they boost ( e.g. "retweet" ) everything that has been posted to the community. Be it a thread or a new comment.

The big upside of kbin is, that it, as you said, combines micro blogging and news aggregation. While Mastodonusers can interact with lemmy content users on lemmy can only reply to comments posted from Mastodon. We have no real way to send a toot (e.g. "tweet") to mastodon deliberately.

Is Mastodon compatible with Lemmy?

https://vijayprema.com/using-lemmy-from-my-existing-mastodon/

I've been doing this a lot over on https://lemmy.world/c/coys. I mostly post directly from my Mastodon account.

Sometimes I have to jump over and use my Lemmy account because, for example, you can't post links (that I know of) in the same way you can directly on Lemmy.